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January 24, 2025
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7
min read
Understanding your users and how they interact with your brand website is key to maximizing conversions. There's no better way to do that than through creating and analyzing a user journey map. In this guide, we'll explore what a user journey map is, how it works, and how you can use it to boost conversions.
A user journey map – sometimes called a customer journey map – is a visual diagram that explores and demonstrates how a user might flow through your website. It starts with contact or discovery of your site or brand, then continues through the customer’s various steps and interactions with touchpoints. In theory, it leads to a customer finally making a purchase or subscribing to one of your brand’s services.
Like conversion funnels, user journey maps identify key customer touchpoints and interactions. However, they also describe the goals and motivations a customer has at each stage.
You can use these maps to:
User journey maps provide several targeted benefits to brands that leverage them regularly. Here are just a few examples.
For starters, user journey maps give you a better, more detailed understanding of your core audience members. This understanding is vital if you want to make targeted and highly effective improvements to your website’s layout or UI, your marketing, and other elements of the UX.
User journey maps can help you boost engagement and revenue, of course. For example, if you notice that users are likely to get confused on the way to check out, a user journey map can help you identify steps you can eliminate to streamline the path to conversion.
Then your customers will make it to the checkout page more frequently, increasing your revenue accordingly.
User journey maps can even help you generate new products. By seeing where your users typically end up on your website, you’ll know which products catch their attention more frequently. You can develop products like those popular offerings, improving your overall catalog.
User journey maps can save you time, mostly by reducing the other analyses you have to do to understand your customers and improve your website. A single good user journey map can give you enough information to make specific, focused CRO improvements.
User journey maps can also help to sharpen your decision-making. Once you know how your prospects are likely to navigate through your site and interact with your brand over their personal journeys, you can make the best decisions possible to improve their experiences and how your brand emotionally resonates with them.
There are lots of specific ways in which mapping user journeys can boost conversions.
For example, if you map out the typical user journey on your website and discover that the landing page doesn't do a good job of diverting customers to short, simple sales flows, eliminating excess pages or improving the landing page's directions can get people deeper into your site and in front of products more frequently.
By making that targeted change, your visitors will see more products, be enticed by their offerings, and make more purchases. Thus, mapping your users’ journeys could significantly increase your conversion rate, no matter how you define a conversion.
UX or user experience is the holistic, comprehensive range of interactions, thoughts, and feelings customers have with your brand. So it’s no surprise that user journey maps can also improve UX.
For instance, if your user journey map shows that customers might prefer a different site layout or page design philosophy, you can adopt those improvements ASAP. When your customers return to your online store, they find that the pages are easier to navigate and that browsing your brand’s available products is much more fun.
That one hypothetical improvement can make a significant difference in how customers see your brand and think about your products. It may even lead to long-term conversion rate improvements!
Now you know why you should create user journey maps, let’s look at how you can map your users’ journeys step-by-step.
First, you need to research your users to fully understand your target audience. When you research your users, you’ll know:
All of that information can help you develop insights that enable you to create accurate user journey maps.
Similarly, you should define specific user personas. For instance, you might have a “window shopper” persona that might make a sporadic or random purchase here and there. But you might also have a dedicated or loyal customer who loves your brand.
Defining different user personas enables you to segment your target audience and create distinct user journey maps for each group.
It’s a good idea to create and analyze user journey maps by selecting different personas to prioritize. In the above example, it only makes sense to focus more on improving the UX for loyal customers rather than window shoppers.
Once you've defined your target audience and fully understand its needs, you can draft your user journey map. Create each of the distinct steps that a prospective customer might take one by one, and remember to include detailed information about motivations and feelings with each.
If needed, you can use a customer journey map template based on user research and the current state of your site. Then, you can adjust the map for future states by changing the point of view as your customers shift, too. Think of your user experience map as an evolving part of the design process with different stages that can change over time.
Don’t keep your user journey map to yourself. Always share it around and get feedback so you can iterate on it and improve it over time, plus make adjustments to things like the mapping process, journey phases, and more.
User journey and user flow sound similar, but they aren’t exactly the same.
User flow is a detailed breakdown of a path a user takes to complete a specific objective. It shows the specific steps, for example, that a customer takes to purchase a product they already know they want from your store or the steps that a customer may take to achieve a customer service solution to a question or complaint.
The user journey, in contrast, is a visual representation of the complete experience and all possible steps that a customer can take when engaging with your product or brand. In this way, your user journey map will likely include several potential user flows as distinct pathways or steps a prospect can take throughout your website.
When you design a user journey map, you might hypothetically design it like this:
This example will allow you to fully visualize how a customer proceeds through the experience with your brand. Armed with that information, you can make targeted, effective improvements to both UI and UX.
As you can see, crafting a user journey map could be a great choice for your marketing or sales teams and conversion rate optimization. At Prismfly, we can help you design and analyze user journey maps that accurately capture the motivations and movements of your target audience members.
That’s why you should contact us today. With our assistance, you’ll see conversion rate improvements in no time. We can also provide help improving your user interface and your UX. Let’s get started!
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
Yusuf Shurbaji has over a decade of ecommerce growth experience. His past work includes building optimization departments & running experimentation inhouse and agency side for Dior, JCPenney, LVMH, American Precious Metals Exchange, Princess Polly, Built Brands, Ladder Sport, Maze Group, HelloFresh, Ledger, Blockchain.com, Kind Snacks, and other 9-figure brands. Yusuf is a Co-Founder of Prismfly, a conversion rate optimization agency focused on growing revenue and EBITDA for D2C ecommerce brands. Prismfly is the first CRO focused Shopify Plus certified agency and has seen triple digit growth the past 2 years.
